


Winter Branches

by Dolorosa



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 00:53:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16800445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolorosa/pseuds/Dolorosa
Summary: Before they were Merriman and the Black Rider, they were two young men, called to the Light at the same moment. The choices each made in the face of their lonely existence as an Old One set them on conflicting paths for the remainder of their long history.This fic is set many centuries before canon.





	Winter Branches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spiderfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderfire/gifts).



They were called to power at the same time, though it was so long ago that no record of their calling remained, save their own memories. They were not the first, but those who had come before were so different — so wild and elemental that they were almost part of the fabric of the land — that they might as well have been. And, unlike later Old Ones, they were called not as children on the cusp of changes they could only dimly imagine, but rather as young men, just stepping through the threshold of adult life.

They had known each other all their lives, having grown up in the same scattered collection of farmhouses. They thought of it as a village, then, because they could not imagine anything larger, anything containing more people. That small group of houses, those fields, and the curling sweep of the river and forest that surrounded them were their entire world. As the two of them grew up, they were always competing — to run the furthest, climb the highest, or find the most unusual objects when they ranged around the forest, pressing on the boundaries of their childhood world. Theirs was a friendly competition: they revelled in each other's finds, hoarding everything — self-bored stones, fragments of blue-tinged birds' eggs, giant, cracked acorns, and unusual feathers — in a shared collection, like a pair of magpies. And while both of them were obliging when it came to carrying out their share of the work of the village — sowing crops, turning over the earth on fallow fields, caring for the shared flock of sheep, and handful of pigs and chickens, repairing the walls and roofs of the thatched cottages — there were moments during which they felt their minds wandering, pulled beyond the bounds of their familiar lives, whispering and hinting at power and knowledge and paths between the stars.

They woke on the same spring morning with the same strange feeling. The frosts had vanished, replaced with a light dew, covering all the new flowers, and the rising sun cast the village in a rosy light. And although ordinarily their village would be a hive of activity by the first hour of daylight — people waking to feed the animals, birds singing, cows being milked, and eggs being collected — on that day everything was silent and still. Neither of them was later able to describe the feeling that woke them, that sense of something calling them on, drawing them out of their houses across fields and boundary walls, their feet leaving no impression in the dewy grass. And neither young man was surprised when, arriving with the sensation that no time had passed at all in a clearing at the silent heart of the forest, the other was there, and they awoke into their new powers together.

The air seemed to crackle with danger and possibility. One of the men, his red hair like a blaze of fire against his pale skin, reached out with a gesture he was not aware of knowing, and flowers bloomed beneath his upturned hands. His companion laughed with delight, and swept one arm in an arc above his head, causing a cascade of leaves and petals to tumble down, followed by birds which seemed to have been summoned by his voiceless call. These nascent powers were unsubtle and uncontrolled; the blooming flowers soon turned into a torrent of choking vines, the birds a diving, shrieking, cacophonous flock. What had been joyful became frightening and overwhelming, until the second man, his hawkish face creased with concern, placed his two palms flat against the earth, thinking _slow_ , and _calm_ , and _stillness_. At once the vine-like flowers ceased their growth, and the birds returned to the forests' canopy. And, as the clearing was restored to its previous unearthly silence, they realised they were not alone. A woman, whose features seemed to shift and change before their eyes, was standing at the foot of one of the ancient oaks. Her face was at one moment smooth and pink as a spring rose, and the next lined with the wisdom of age and framed with grey. Only her eyes — alight with compassion and contemplation — remained constant. Her clothes were the deep green of the forest, and she wore a crown of flowers on her brow. Their hearts racing with awe and exhilaration, the two men moved toward her. She took their hands, and led them onwards into the depths of the forest.

*

Both men would probably say, if asked, that the years that followed were among the happiest of their long lives. Where before their existence had been circumscribed, their every activity contained within the bounds of their small village, and every act determined by the sure turn of the seasons, they now had to learn to be boundless. Every road and path and animal track in the land become open to them, and there was a kind of freedom in spending one night in a hillfort, the next sleeping among hay bales in a stable, and the next curled among the roots and leaves at the foot of a tree. Their roaming took them north among great glens and craggy mountains, west to slate-covered valleys, east across marshy fens, and south to rare sandy beaches, smelling of fish and salt and seaweed. They were learning to recognise the very bones of the earth, to read the land, to speak with trees and rocks and the smooth stones of the rivers. They learnt to recognise patterns in the flight of birds and the shape of clouds, to calm the storms and call the rain. They learnt how to determine when objects made by human hands had been imbued with unearthly power, and how to bend that power to their use. They learnt the secret names of all the hidden powers of the land, and the places where those elemental beings might be present and visible to mortals. They learnt — and this was the most difficult thing of all — how to read what was in the hearts of all the ordinary people they encountered, how to hear the words unspoken and predict a person's actions and choices. And, in those half-forgotten days of roaming and learning, when nothing was sure save the road beneath their feet, they learnt the limits of their own strength.

In those days, the boundary between the supernatural and physical worlds was blurred, and the two of them were recognised for what they were: Old Ones. They were forever being called on to intervene in disputes both large and small. Sometimes this was as simple as establishing ownership of a flock of sheep that had wandered out of one farmer's fields and into another's, and on other occasions it involved overseeing the aftermath of an armed conflict between any number of the tiny, cloak-sized kingdoms that dotted the island. Both men privately found these squabbles absurd — though the leaders who instigated them described them as 'wars', they involved such small numbers of people, essentially warlords and their mercenary or coerced followers, and were frequently little more than glorified cattle raids. On many such occasions the conflict was sparked by a dispute over a single hillside, plain, or curve in a river, with each ruler insisting on its symbolic, rather than strategic significance — it might have been named for an ancient ancestor, or have been the site of some historic slight that a king felt _must_ be avenged. Every ruler who called himself a king would have at least one bard attached to his retinue, whose job it was to recall all this half-mythologised history, and to turn it into poetic praise or laments of past grievances, and this fed into the general atmosphere of petty disputes and constant raiding.

The two of them did not use their powers to sway the course of battles, nor use them in the service of any individual ruler's political aims. As Old Ones they were supposed to be beyond that — keepers of the peace, maintaining the balance, and mediating between the visible and invisible worlds. Their purpose was to see hidden patterns, to understand the various potential paths that would unfold from a person's choices like thread unspooling, and, if possible, nudge them towards a safer path. Beyond that, they could not intervene. They were meant to be impartial.

This would prove to be a problem, later.

*

They met on a battlefield. The echoes of the violence that had been done there still remained — the earth turned over, churned up by the impact of hundreds of hurrying feet, the broken remains of spears, and, here and there, the bodies. The ground was covered with a thin layer of frost, and their breath was visible in the wintry air. The older of the two men, who had left his childhood name behind forever in favour of something more hawkish, evoking a particular kind of falcon that returned to the island in the winter months, was standing, implacable, at the edge of plain, the staff he now habitually carried in his hands, his eyes scanning the horizon. His erstwhile companion paced the ground in agitation, his body in constant motion. After several years spent learning together, they had gone their separate ways, to deepen their knowledge in solitude and contemplation. This was the first time their paths had crossed since then, although they had felt each other's presence in the air, in the lines of the earth, in the whispers of the trees, many times since they had parted.

'I tried to outrun all this,' the younger of the two Old Ones said, his hair blazing against the grey sweep of the sky. 'I even crossed the ocean, to wander for a time in the lands to the east of this island. I took myself away from all human habitation, travelling half-forgotten paths in the high northern mountains, where only goats and eagles marked my presence. I recognised your footsteps in the crushed gorse and heather that grew on the high places and stayed away. I kept myself apart for as long as I could, because I knew when I returned it would be to blood and battle, and I don't know how to hold myself aloof from it any more.'

The other man, his interlocutor, sighed, and his face was lined with grief and concern.

'You know it is our charge. It is the price we pay for our knowledge, for our powers, and for our extraordinarily long lives: to see how things will unfold, and to do nothing. To look on the violence that mortals inflict on one another, and take no sides.'

'But how can we not take sides? How can you be so resolute, so unmoved, so _certain_? How can you look on this and not feel horror?'

'Oh, my friend, what makes you think I am unmoved? But tell me something: when you witness the aftermath of this battle, the ground churned up, the bodies picked clean and left for the birds and foxes, the war bands back in their hillforts to exalt or lament, what side would you take? You know how these border conflicts, these squabbles over cattle, or river estuaries, or unquiet plains go. Which side has the right of it? Which the wrong? How would you determine which war leader to support? To which side would you give the gift of your considerable powers, and which would therefore bear the brunt of the terrible, overwhelming might of an Old One? Maybe at some point in the distant future, human wars will have one side clearly in the right, and another in the wrong, and then of course I will fight beside those whose cause is of the Light, but the battles we have seen so far have not been so. And until they are, how could I possibly choose to tip the scales to one side or the other?'

His companion said nothing, but his expression was a torment of confusion and indecision.

'What makes you think,' the hawkish man continued, his voice grave, 'that I have not picked a side? There are other sides than the two that did battle here today.'

'And yet you still did not prevent the carnage!' his companion said, his voice suffused with fury and grief.

'For someone who is raging against me for my lack of indecision, you certainly sound as if you've made a choice of your own, and will not be persuaded otherwise.'

The younger man drew closer.

'It's not enough,' he said. 'It's not enough that I know the hidden paths through the forests, and the words that call Tethys from the sea, and the truths that are revealed if a man drinks from the spring at the top of a hill at midnight. It will never be enough, if I must remain still, and calm, and certain. I need to doubt, and grieve, and take sides!'

'Is it not enough to know that with our powers we are able to prevent greater carnage — to counsel moderation, to negotiate a peace more likely to be lasting?'

'Unlike you, I cannot be confident that in some time in the future, order will prevail. I can no longer be satisfied with merely holding back the tide!'

'It is clear that nothing I say will persuade you. Please, remember, old friend, you who were a child with me on forest paths, remember in the future what I have said to you here on this battle-scarred plain. Remember, in the chaos as you rush wildly along every path, that you made this choice in the full knowledge of what it would mean, and what it is you are giving up today.'

The other man laughed bitterly.

'Oh, so that is how it is! When it comes to human affairs you stand apart, equivocating, but when it comes to us — to real power — you've made up your mind quickly enough! The _Light_!' he spat contemptuously. 'What pretty lies we tell ourselves!'

And he turned, in a chaotic whirl of black cloak and windswept hair, and strode from the battlefield. His feet left no impressions on the frost-covered plain. His interlocutor paused for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts, his staff pressed into the frozen earth. And then he too walked away, certain and secure in his decision, but grieving what had transpired nonetheless.

He went on, alone.

**Author's Note:**

> I loved your prompt of Merriman and the Rider both starting off as Old Ones together, and it got me thinking about what might have caused the Rider to change sides. This fic is one answer to that question.


End file.
